Tuesday, January 17, 2017

How do you connect to your SharePoint Office365 tenant with the PowerShell if you are locked behind a proxy? This hint will probably work for all kind of PowerShell scripts, not only for Office PnP. I tried this with the Microsoft SharePoint Online extensions as well and it worked.

So my problem was, the company I was working for, had a proxy which could not be bypassed. The proxy settings have been set by a GPO and the network settings where fine so far. However the proxy used user authentication to access the internet. Now if I want to use the SharePoint Online tools, I must authenticate my PowerShell session at the proxy so the tools can access the internet too.

The trick to get your PowerShell connected is quite simple. You only need to enter the following line:

Thursday, January 5, 2017

After installing a new SharePoint 2013 farm, I noticed a few messages in the Windows event log:

A certificate validation operation took 14988.6926 milliseconds and has exceeded the execution time threshold. If this continues to occur, it may represent a configuration issue. Please see http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=246987 for more details.

The SharePoint server does not have access to the Internet, or the server is protected by a firewall that has limited ports open. In this situation, users intermittently experience long delays when they perform certain operations, such as logging in to the site or performing a search. Users may also encounter HTTP timeouts when they perform these operations.

The mean you must either let your server access the internet, what most of the time won't be possible due to policy reasons, or we need a other solution. Good for us that the knowlege base article offers two possible solutions.

Monday, January 2, 2017

What do you need to uninstall from your server if the installation with AutoSPInstaller wasn’t successful?

Installing a SharePoint Server with the AutoSPInstaller job has become the gold standard for administrators. It’s much easier for large farms and offers a high degree of quality. However, using AutoSPInstaller can be a bit of a hassle. Until you get the xml configuration right, you normally need a few approaches. You can start the installation again, but you need to remove a few things first before it will re-run successfully.

Languages

If you are installing language files with your SharePoint Farm, remove these packages first. Open the Windows Control Panel, go to Programs -> Uninstall a program. Search for any SharePoint Language Package that has been installed and remove them all.

SharePoint Server

Leave the Control Panel open. Search for the SharePoint Server binary installation package and remove that file as well.

Prerequisites

These files must not be removed. They can stay on the server.

Internet Information Server

Open the IIS Management and look for any Web Application that was created during the AutoSPInstaller setup. Remove all of them and the Application Pools as well. Because AutoSPInstaller will create all of them again, I normally delete all Application Pools and Web Applications from IIS. This way I’ll have a clean system after setup.
The Web Applications create directories in the VirtualDirectories folder of the IIS working directory. You normally find it here:
C:\inetpub\wwwroot\wss
Remove the folders from the Web Applications you have deleted from here as well.

Log files

Remove the log files from the ULS logging directory or do a clean up after you sucsessfully installed SharePoint.

Search Index

If the SharePoint Search has been created already, go to the directory where the search index is stored. Delete all GUID directories you find there.

SQL Server

Open the SQL Management Studio and connect with the SQL instance you are using to host the SharePoint databases. Delete any database that has been created by the AutoSPInstaller script. At the prompt to delete the database, you should select to close any connection to the database.

Finally

Now reboot your server. After login back into the server you can restart the installation with AutoSPInstaller. Any traces of previous installations will be gone then.

About me

I am an IT-Professional with over 15 years of work experience in implementing Complex IT projects.
My area of expertise covers all project’s life-cycle phases: technical and business analysis; architecture of IT solutions; building IT solutions; testing; training; technical and operational support